Cogmind Beta 11 Feature Voting Results (+) (Patreon)

Thanks to everyone who participated in the feature voting--the final results are in!

We have a very clear winner, the new on-map item searching and filtering feature I mocked up earlier this month. Again, it'll look something like this.

I'll be refining the design and actually building it soon enough, because I decided that this will be the first feature built for Beta 11, specifically so that all of you can enjoy using it in the subsequent pre-release content updates we're going to be doing starting next month.

After having taken two weeks off following the ARG release to finally take care of some personal things, I was hoping to have gotten started on this work this week, but unfortunately my laptop started overheating again while streaming last week, and it really was about time to get a new one anyway, so... new laptop time!

Acer Predator Helios 300 PH317-54

I actually hate getting a new laptop because it's an extremely time-consuming process to configure the OS, install tons of different software, migrate settings and data, and of course deal with the inevitable issues along the way...

Like I should've already finished the data migration portion yesterday, but it turns out my Crashplan backup service is a piece of crap when it comes to that (but if you believe the tutorial on their website it's so easy!), so after trying to move files that way, as one should be able to, I'm giving up on it and will just handle it myself, but that sure wasted a lot of time dealing with tons of unexpected behavior, bugs in their system, and a poorly-designed UI.

I even opened a support ticket yesterday to ask what I should do with the biggest problem I found, and the one-line instruction they gave me literally said to do something the tutorial specifically warns against because doing so will delete all of your data backups. Anyway, they got a nice email full of feedback they need to hear, and I'm done with them.

Of course there are advantages to getting a new laptop, like this amazing new NVMe SSD. This is a really nice laptop--I normally get very mid-range stuff focusing on just a good CPU and average GPU, but now I've gone for a somewhat higher-end machine with some pretty good bells and whistles. I mean I use this thing all day almost every day for work and play, for 4~5 years, so spending an extra few hundred dollars on it is probably fine :P

Also I normally buy ASUS, but they didn't have anything that both fit the bill and had good reviews, whereas this Acer is one of the most popular laptops in this price range right now, and for good reason, so I went for it.

Before starting to install or migrate anything, to stress test the machine and make sure nothing was defective I installed Steam and tried some games out with maxed graphics. Having not played any AAA games in years, that was entertaining and I think my son and I will be playing Jedi: Fallen Order in our spare time (very slowly xD) for a while now. We've been watching The Mandalorian, which is fun and apparently how he's getting introduced to Star Wars (I just wanted to watch it myself and he wandered in one day), and he's like "wow I've never seen a Jedi before" when I started up the game. Not super far into it yet, but it's a pretty neat game.

That was last weekend when I first got the laptop, and that plus some analysis seemed to rule out any serious defects, so this week it was finally time to do all the boring but important work involved with setting up a new dev machine. Yay.

Okay, so that was a longer-than-expected wall of text, but my main point was to say that this week has basically been dedicated to that purpose, and it should have been done by now but I guess it's getting pushed back to the end of the week due to the data issues...

Streaming

In good news, I did end up unexpectedly getting things set up just enough to stream at my normal time this week, so used it for one last Prospector stream, and will be getting back to a fresh Cogmind run next. In fact, since I skipped last week I'll probably do an extra stream tomorrow if possible. Not sure what time yet. Also not sure what type of run to stream...

After that I'll most likely be streaming/exploring ASCII Sector, the last of the major space roguelikes we haven't covered yet.

If you hadn't heard, I wrote my thoughts on Prospector (and compared to Approaching Infinity) on r/TraditionalRoguelikes.

No December Event

My original plan back in October was to try to squeeze in two separate events/special modes by the end of the year, like I did in 2019--one for Halloween and another for Winter/New Years, but I realized that there was basically no way I'd be able to fit everything into my schedule, and maintain the desirable quality level, certainly not for this second event I had planned, so I've decided to postpone that event, probably saving it for the end of 2021 (!).

Plus trying to squeeze it in now would simply push back Beta 11 yet further, and I think the development focus should probably be on that because that alone is going to be a pretty huge amount of work, so we don't want it to be too far out there...

Anyway, long story short: No more events are currently planned, and we're going straight to Beta 11 instead.

Yes December Work

Next month I'll start out by doing some writing for the blog, at least an ARG postmortem, plus I guess it'll also be time for the usual annual review I do over there. Then I'll start on the item search and filtering, and after that there should still be time to get a preliminary test build out looking at potential alternative approaches to storage in Cogmind. Still haven't decided where to start with that, but anyway it's early yet so I haven't done a review of what's necessary to test out the various possibilities. (Note there is lots of discussion regarding Beta 11 on the forums these months, and also some relevant discussions on Discord but those aren't often worth looking for like on the forums where everything is actually organized :P)

Thanks to everyone for the support! We've picked up a decent number of patrons in the past month since I linked to it from the Steam news, and I've been pleasantly surprised we're not far from the next content milestone/goal. If we end up reaching that (and staying there, of course) then it'll happen before 1.0, possibly even the focus of whatever next Beta version is coming at the time. No rush though, since Beta 11 is already too packed as is xD

And if you don't know what the Unchained are, well the ARG event has at least a partial answer for you ;)